Thursday, December 10, 2009

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Because that's what this morning was - a glorious wonderland of glittering, flittering flakes. I love the snow! I love everything about it, even driving in it. You'll never hear me making comments about "trying to survive the snow," or "wanting to fly south," or "wishing that white stuff out there would disappear," or anything of the sort. I love it! It's beautiful, it's clean, it's like a Pavlovian bell for snuggling up and becoming nostalgic.

On a related note that you will hopefully soon understand said relation, I tried out my new alarm clock today. The one that promises a sensory experience guaranteed to boost your aura, or something like that. It simulates a sunrise and emits nature sounds to peacefully, and gradually wake you. Turns out, I slept straight through it all and woke up when the "sun" had been fully risen and birds had chirped their little feathery heads off in a rain forest a continent away for a full ten minutes. BUT, I did get up, bright and bleary, just after 6:30. And thus I went walking in the fluffy morning.

I used to wake up at 6:30 every morning and walk 2-3 miles before work. Then I got lazy, my bed got cozy, and the days grew shorter, and I stopped waking up at 6:30 to go walking. Que simulated sunrise alarm clock, and today I got up and walked 1 mile. But, it was through 8 inches of snow and a layer of ice, so I felt like I could justifiably consider it equivalent to at least 2 miles, if not more. Then there was shoveling snow, and I considered myself adequately worked-out for the day.

The keyword here is "the day," which I guess is two words. The key two words here are "the day." The bigger picture shows me in this exact cycle:

Check out the whole series here. It's worth looking at the whole thing (which I condensed to get you to go there and look for yourself, because I can't show you the whole thing and leave nothing for the artist to lure you in with).

Anyway, I got the alarm clock with the hopes of rising early every morning to commence my morning walk while simultaneously enjoying the wintery weather. Why? Because I feel like a bloated, puffy version of myself. Like, had the 18-year old me fallen in a river and drowned, only to be discovered days later, the current me would look strikingly similar, only a little less blue and a little less wet.

I contemplated having a little sidebar gadget where I could publicly confess to the fruits of my daily toilings and therefore be more motivated to actually get off my butt to save face, but then I realized that my laziness has reached a level that even public recognition of itself would be unlikely to motivate it to change its ways (I may have just personified my laziness and I'm not going to go back and change the case or tense or whatever kind of grammar thing-a-ma-job-i-bob you'd call it).

And so, I leave you with a scene of a winter wonderland that will hopefully become my motivation to get out of bed every morning, because who can sleep through this:

I think they're the blue LED Christmas lights, or maybe they're something else, but either way they look like this:

or this:

Or this:

They're those blue light that ares starting to pop up everywhere that you can't quite get your eyes to focus on, so you end up staring at them all bug-eyed while their vibrating blue light permeates your optical nerve to induce immediate migrane nausea. I am completely convinced that these things can induce epilepsy without even blinking.

I haven't looked this year, but last year they put these lights on the trees on either side of the thoroughfare at Gateway. I literally (and by literally, I do actually mean literally) nearly crashed into the back of a mall security car while trying to focus my vision between the fog of reverberating blue before my eyes.

I know they make those LED lights in other colors, but there's something about the blue that gets my cornea wriggling.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Christmas is here! Well, the Christmas season, at least. I know, stores have had Christmas decorations since mid-September, but I ignored them all until now.
Now it is the real Christmas season, not that faux one where you buy your plastic light-up reindeer from Wal-mart with the air conditioner blowing down on your freshly highlighted hair.

No, now it is Christmas - real Christmas. The one with the snow (hopefully), the lights, the coziness of scrunching the walls of your house in a little tighter as you add cheery knick-knacks to every corner, every shelf, every countertop. Now it is Christmas.

At my house, Christmas means German cookies, advent, incense cones streaming smoke from wooden faces, candles spinning pyramid blades, and peppermint tea. I love German Christmas! I love every bit of it, especially that little extra holiday we get to slip in there on December 6.

Though I love Christmas, and the holiday season being full on upon us, I am still missing my favorite holiday of all. It came and went so quickly this year that I hardly missed it until long after the fact. But while reading a paragraph of Ray Bradbury, I suddenly found myself visualizing a snapshot of standing in a corn maze with a full moon above, and the sounds of dry husks rasping in my ears. I got that weird nostalgic feeling where you're equally happy and distraught about things remembered. Thank heavens for Christmas, otherwise I don't think I'd be able to survive!